This article examines how the phenomenological concept of habit can be productively deployed in the analysis of racism, in order to propose a reframing of the problem. Racism does not unfold primarily in the register of conscious thought or action, I argue, but more intimately and insidiously in the register of bodily habit. This claim, however, relies on a reading of habit as bodily orientation – or habituation – as developed by Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception. Drawing on his (...) account, I turn to two salient dimensions of racist praxis which I argue are better understood through the frame of habit: bodily gesture or response, and racialized perception. Building on the analyses of contemporary critical race thinkers, I argue that racism is habitual insofar as it is embedded in bodily modes of responding to the presentation of racialized ‘others’ and in ‘sedimented’ modes of racialized seeing. However, this is not to suggest that the acquisition of racist habits is passive, or that such habits foreclose the possibility of change. In the final section, I revisit the concept of habit and its usual characterization as ‘sedimentation’ or ‘calcification’. I argue that while such a reading gives voice to the anchoring weight of the temporal past in habit, a more prospective rendering of the concept is available to us through a rereading of sedimentation as active passivity; habits are not only acquired, they are also held. This in turn will allow us to recast the question of responsibility in relation to one’s racist habits. (shrink)

In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.

INTRODUCTION Ever since the beginning of the modern phenomenological movement disciplined attention has been paid to various patterns of human experience as ...

Addressing the matter of attention from a phenomenological perspective as it bears on the problem of becoming aware, I draw on Edmund Husserl''s analyses and distinctions that mark his genetic phenomenology. I describe several experiential levels of affective force and modes of attentiveness, ranging from what I call dispositional orientation and passive discernment to so-called higher levels of attentiveness in cognitive interest, judicative objectivation, and conceptualization. These modes of attentiveness can be understood as motivating a still more active mode of (...) reflective attention, i.e., philosophical attentiveness, and to this extent, even it would be subject to varying influences of affection. What role, if any, does affection play in a peculiar kind of reflective attention that is phenomenological? I conclude by briefly considering phenomenological reflective attentiveness and its relation to affection. (shrink)

https://rug.academia.edu/corijnvanmazijk.

Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race understands Black embodiment within the context of white hegemony within the context of a racist, anti-Black world. Yancy demonstrates that the Black body is a historically lived text on which whites have inscribed their projections which speak equally forcefully to whites' own self-conceptualizations.

Prolonged solitary confinement has become a widespread and standard practice in U.S. prisons—even though it consistently drives healthy prisoners insane, makes the mentally ill sicker, and, according to the testimony of prisoners, threatens to reduce life to a living death. In this profoundly important and original book, Lisa Guenther examines the death-in-life experience of solitary confinement in America from the early nineteenth century to today’s supermax prisons. Documenting how solitary confinement undermines prisoners’ sense of identity and their ability to understand (...) the world, Guenther demonstrates the real effects of forcibly isolating a person for weeks, months, or years. -/- Drawing on the testimony of prisoners and the work of philosophers and social activists from Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis, the author defines solitary confinement as a kind of social death. It argues that isolation exposes the relational structure of being by showing what happens when that structure is abused—when prisoners are deprived of the concrete relations with others on which our existence as sense-making creatures depends. Solitary confinement is beyond a form of racial or political violence; it is an assault on being. (shrink)

Drawing on Françoise Dastur’s suggestion that the event is a permanent possibility that shapes lived experience, but also, when it occurs, a distinctive temporal rupture, I argue that the initial weeks of the COVID-19 epidemic constitute an event, in her sense. Connecting this phenomenological point to literatures on the politics of temporality, I suggest that the distinction between event and normal experience maps to that between epidemic and endemic. Understanding some of the political and ethical erasures of death and debility (...) in COVID times can thus be mutually informed by phenomenological analysis. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the temporal openness of perceptual experience provides insight into the basic structure of learning. I draw on Husserl's account of the mutability of the retained past inAnalyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, and Merleau‐Ponty's account of the perceptual field, as well as his remarks on habit, inPhenomenology of Perception, in order to elucidate the relation between the perceptual past and the future it portends. More specifically, I argue that retention and habituation in perceptual experience (...) open dimensions of meaning that transform the initial, initiating, experiences in which meaning is first established. As a result, our experience of meaning is always subject to further development that we cannot anticipate. This temporal openness has consequences for our learning to navigate a perceptual field, but also, I argue, for our developing more complex ways of engaging with the world. Specifically, I show how learning requires that we commit ourselves to an object or task before we are in a position to recognize the implications or significance of our commitment. I further consider the role that others play in the inherent openness of learning to the development of new meaning. (shrink)

Husserl seldom refers to feelings, and when he does, he mainly focuses on their axiological character, which corresponds to a specific kind of value apprehension. This paper aims to discuss the role of feelings in Husserl from a different angle. For this purpose it makes a detour through Husserl’s early account of attention. In a text from 1898 on attention the aspect of interest, which is said to have a basis in feeling, plays an essential role. Although Husserl argues here (...) that every specific interest is dependent on an objectifying act of perception, he at the same time states that every act of perception necessarily has to be accompanied by an interest of some sort. In the latter sense, the genuine motivational force and necessity of this feeling aspect, namely interest, is emphasized. This ambiguity – or even contradiction – shall be the point of departure for the following considerations. The paper argues that it is possible to interpret the role of feelings in intentionality in a different way, namely not as an effect of current perception but as a cause of further perceptions. This tendency is first indicated in the text from 1898 and elaborated further in Husserl’s genetic approach in Experience and Judgment. In Experience and Judgment Husserl develops a broader notion of interest, defining it as a general perceptual drive. This general drive – so the paper will argue – expresses itself in concrete perception as a specific preference: it discloses or makes manifest what is relevant for an individual subject at a given time. (shrink)

_Examines how violence has been conceptually and rhetorically put to use in continental social theory._.